ARTICLES ABOUT OVERHAUL BY DATE - PAGE 4

The four-year, $492 million project to overhaul the O'Hare branch of the CTA Blue Line starts this weekend with temporary track closures between the Western and Logan Square stations, the transit agency said Thursday. The track closure will start at 10 p.m. Friday and end by 4 a.m. Monday.The CTA will provide free shuttle bus service and free transfers back into rail stations. Shuttle buses will stop at each station affected by the track closure - Western, California and Logan Square -- to pick up and drop off passengers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Labor Secretary Tom Perez offered details this week about the Obama administration's push to revise overtime pay regulations, confirming the Labor Department may close a "loophole" in the test used to determine which workers are managers. Perez said the Labor Department's current test is a "loophole" in U.S. wage-and-hour law that lets employers treat many workers as overtime-ineligible managers even if a lot of their work is the same as non-managers, who do get overtime.

For most of October and part of November, Dr. Stephen Ondra couldn't sleep. The launch of the Affordable Care Act, the national health care overhaul that Ondra played a hand in crafting and implementing, had landed with a thud. At first, federal officials blamed a crush of consumers for the overloaded capacity and widespread technical problems plaguing the federal website where consumers were supposed to buy new health insurance policies. But it soon became clear the issues were much deeper and would take much longer to solve.

A task force studying reform of the region's mass transit system is considering two plans that would drastically overhaul the way the Chicago area's network of buses and trains is overseen and operated. Both scenarios call for eliminating the Regional Transportation Authority, originally created by referendum in 1973 and whose oversight of the CTA, Metra and Pace was beefed up by the legislature in 2008. Critics say the agency has failed to live up to its promise. The recommendations also would significantly transform the transit agencies, stripping them of their major decision-making and policymaking abilities.

The revolution lasted a decade - from 2002 through 2012 - and a few battles remain to be fought. But the determination of fed-up voters has improved Cook County government. The cleanup peaked in 2010 with the primary election defeat of then-County Board President Todd Stroger. He and his board allies - warning, some remain - personified three tax-and-spend excesses that for many years hobbled county government: patronage hiring, abuse of taxpayers and shabby treatment of poor citizens who rely on county services.

I applauded when the College Board announced plans to revamp the SAT college entrance exam for 2016, eliminating obscure vocabulary and deductions for wrong answers - even though it's too late for me. I still feel scarred from my lackluster performance more than 40 years ago. Yes, that means I'm 61. Even now, I admit my age more cavalierly than my SAT scores. I was one of two students in my elementary school scoring high enough on an IQ test to skip third grade. Years later I qualified to skip eighth grade.

LOS ANGELES/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Walt Disney overhauled its struggling interactive division in a sweeping reorganization that will reduce the number of video games it develops and alter its advertising strategy to focus more on the fast-changing mobile market. As part of the revamp, Disney will lay off 700 employees, roughly one-quarter of the interactive division, according to a person with knowledge of the layoffs. A Disney spokeswoman would not confirm the number. Disney's games and online division has for years been a persistent money loser and a small but significant drag on a corporate empire that spans movie-making and television to cable network ESPN, theme parks and cruise lines.

HOUSTON, March 6 (Reuters) - Motiva Enterprises has rescheduled a planned overhaul of a 200,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) crude distillation unit at its 600,000-bpd Port Arthur, Texas, refinery until 2015, the second time the work has been pushed back, said sources familiar with operations at the refinery. Motiva also plans to shut the 90,000-bpd gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracking unit at the Port Arthur refinery for a second time in 2014 to repair a leaking boiler, said the sources.

By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN, Texas, March 5 (Reuters) - An obligatory essay, arcane vocabulary words and penalties for wrong answers will be gone from the widely used SAT exam as of 2016 as administrators try to make the standardized test more reflective of a student's readiness for college. The College Board, which oversees the exam required by most colleges and universities for admission, wants the test to focus more on what students learn in high school and their ability to think analytically, its chief executive said on Wednesday.